611: Distro Double Trouble

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.

And my name is Brent.

Hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show today, we're going to take a look at Fedora 42 and Ubuntu 2504, fresh off the mirrors, what's new, what works, maybe what doesn't, and our thoughts after trying each of them out and a few of the different spins. Then we're going to round out the show with some great boosts, killer picks, and a lot more. There is quite a bit of show today. So before we get into it, we have to say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room.

Hey, Chris. Hey, Wes. And hello, Brent. Hi.

Hello. And hello, everybody up there in the quiet listening, too. The very quiet listening. And a big good morning to our friends at Tailscale, tailscale.com slash unplugged. Tailscale is the easiest way to connect your devices and services to each other, wherever they are. And if you go to tailscale.com slash unplugged, you'll get tailscale for free on 100 devices and three users, no credit card required. And then you'll build yourself out a flat mesh network protected by...

Our secret accountability.

Try it out. You might really like it and take the path that me and many listeners have where you deploy it for yourself, changes the way you do networking, and then you bring it to work. And there are thousands of companies just like us that are using Tailscale for their infrastructure. Duolingo, Hugging Face, Instacart, and more, all using Tailscale. Try it for yourself or for a business. Just get started at tailscale.com slash unplugged.

Wow.

So I want to start with something sort of bittersweet, and that is that the self-hosted podcast will be wrapping up at the end of May. Alex and I have thought a lot about it for a while. When's the right time? How long does the show go? It's been going for about five years. And we thought with episode 150, because we're fans of nice round numbers, which comes in at the end of May. probably if you're going to pick a place, the right place to do it.

It should be a lot of fun.

And that's one now, an extra one we get to now fold into the show. And, you know, we've been teasing this one for a few weeks. But the boys are ready to deploy their first Home Assistant instance.

I'm slightly afraid.

It's going to be great. I'll be there with you. Well, don't worry. It'll go great. And I haven't really decided what I'll do about replacing self-hosted. We'll see how that goes. Linux Fest is coming up. It's an opportunity to meet with people. But there's also a lot we can bring to the show. It's a little bit of extra work-life balance for both Alex and I. And it means it's an opportunity to bring a little more energy into Linux Unplugged.

Got our headsets and everything.

Got the headsets. Thank you, audience. And big shout out to Hybrid Sarcasm with an extra side donation. So we're going to have LinuxFest Northwest coverage live Saturday, April 26, 10 a.m.

Eastern. Yeah right but there was actually multiple things going on for the celebration because there was like a GitLab interview and then a GitHub video.

Here we go. Here we go.

It is true. He is humble and probably for the right reasons, right? Because really, while he did give birth to it.

Fedora 42 and Ubuntu 25.

He's pretty smart and quick to hand it off and he wanted to go back to Chrome.

It's pretty fun. I think there's admittedly just a lot of excitement around Fedora because it's the 42 release. It's also Matthew Miller's final release, which was nice to see him write up a little thing in the Fedora magazine. and I think there's a lot to like in here. We'll get to some of this, but just at a high level, I think the first thing we want to talk about is Fedora Workstation gets the new installer, that new Anaconda Web UI installer. I don't even know if you'd know it's a Web UI.

I kind of say I didn't, I wasn't going to choose favorites, but now that you're making me choose, I'm going to agree with you. It was super kind of streamlined, which was the opposite experience that I typically have with Fedora.

Is a nice perspective now that i've never really had too many complaints with the time zone selector other than i have to select la they also come with a new feature which i'll talk about in a minute which is quote reinstall fedora option if you already have fedora installed you see this after you already have a fedora 42 install if you reboot off of the installer iso another option in the installer shows up reinstall fedora and

The reason why that is even there is because of ButterFS.

Oh, okay.

The feature relies on the fact that when we install with ButterFS, your user data is separated out into a separate subvolume. So all Anaconda has to do is just blow away the operating system subvolume, reinstall it, and mount your home subvolume again.

I mean, a decade apart, okay, but then in the two decades since then.

It's very easy and very safe.

The world of open source is so great. Absolutely exploded, partially powered by Git and, of course, by Linux in a different way. So we just have a—there are a lot more other—you can use other people's tools.

We also got a Cosmic spin with this release, better SGX support. We see the new Linux DRM panic screen in this release. Yeah. KD Plasma 6.3.

Lands, XFCE 4.2.0, and LXQ 2.1.

In here as well.

So these were versions of Emacs. So if you imagine back in the day.

Emacs was fairly simple. All of the features really come from GNOME 48.

It's quite a robust environment, right? Almost an operating system.

A new JavaScript engine for GNOME. Better mock discrete graphics support for monitors.

So yeah, he has a random version of Micro Emacs with some private modifications.

The new digital well-being stuff is in GNOME 48.

Yeah, it...

Maybe the biggest one, though.

It's basic.

HDR support.

I did.

High dynamic range support.

My mistake...

It's a little early.

I popped it open. It is packaged in X.

I don't even know if it recognizes my monitor as HDR, but it let me do HDR.

As I do often with Vim, I just wanted to open a buffer without necessarily saving it. I wasn't intending to keep it. I just wanted to try the other.

Yeah, I mean, it's big.

Give it a file name to save.

And it's great.

It's fantastic.

It's something that the Mac could do that was tricky on Gano. They also have the preserved battery health setting that lets you, on systems that support it, set the max charge to 80%.

Maybe because I hadn't totally cleared my buffer. Yeah, but the easiest way that I could figure out to quit was to save it to a file, and then I could save and quit. So I just wanted to do a temp file. All the stuff you get with GNOME 48, if you go with the workstation release. You also see the plasma version right alongside the workstation download. Non-modal editor. What a mind.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So, Brent, which spin did you give a go of Fedora 42?

Well, because you guys keep getting on me about not, you know, giving them enough of a try.

I figured, hey, everybody's talking about how this is a great version.

I would get this little going. Gosh darn it. You know, tells you about the data structure in the library that the thing you're looking at came from in all these modern environments. So, I'm really having some existential questions like that.

Uh-oh. I mean, they are nice. Uh-oh.

Am I going that far? I, yeah.

It sounds like you liked it.

I did like it. I don't know what this means for the future of Brent's desktop, but I think they're doing amazing things and starting to win me over. So maybe I'll try it again, like long-term. We'll see.

Okay. I'm noting that one down.

Please do.

No, I thought you were going to try the plasma spin. I just assumed.

Well, I thought I should try something new, given plasma's in my everyday, And they talk such a great game about the Plasma desktop in Fedora. Like, saying features for everyone, for creators, scientists, developers, gamers, and it's customizable. I think they did an amazing job at describing exactly what the Plasma desktop is and offers compared to Workstation.

Now, you also were going to try the Cosmic Spin, I believe.

Yes, I was hoping you wouldn't bring that up. Yeah, you think we might be past that?

Oh, well, that's what I'm the most excited to hear about.

I know, I gave it a shot in a VM and ran into some major issues and never even got to that desktop.

Unfortunately.

I don't know if you boys tried it and got some more luck.

But I ran into a Poison A, which is kind of fun. and I think I need to do a little bit more work to find out if it's just my particular VM setup or what and try it on some hardware.

Maybe I'd have some better luck.

And there are things, right? Like Fossil is a very interesting one.

Did either of you do that show?

You know, as it's based on like a theory of patches, there's several of these that are sort of, they are in many ways better than Git, maybe not all, and not even necessarily just in a porcelain sense.

I should have had a Neil there holding my hand the whole time.

That's what I did wrong.

Thank you, Neil.

That's great.

Yeah, I discovered this while I was developing it. So like, well, I wasn't solely developing, but like when I was putting it together, along with Ryan Brew and the other folks in Fedora Cosmic, I discovered fairly quickly that you basically can't run it without hardware accelerated graphics being enabled.

Yeah.

And since no virtual machine platform turns it on by default, it will just crash. So you need to turn it on and then try again and it will work.

Stay tuned for next episode.

So for me i'm gonna give the cosmic spin a try but i'm waiting i'm just gonna wait for a few weeks after the release uh did you have any other right we're past that it exists now so i have to it has to be.

An evolution no.

I really didn't which uh is unusual.

I do think it's funny, because if you go check it out there's uh now been 175 different contributors to the project and over 20,000 commits. So even on its own, it's a pretty decent project.

I agree. I saw Tyler in our live chat too saying that, you know, it's the one I'm going to give a go. I'm going to come back to it. I'll jump ahead and tell you why I didn't give Cosmic a spin. And this is, it's fine. It's fine. But I am, my laptop these days is an M1 MacBook Pro. and I run Asahi Fedora on there. So for me, both of these releases have really come very far in their ARM support, especially in 42 and in 2504. It's delightfully improved.

I got myself a debbing container running.

I know you noticed this too, Wes.

And then grabbed myself the code for the apt 3.0 release. Managed to get it compiled. And then I did the thing where I installed all the generated deb files and overrope a package manager in place with the new version.

And it kept working. It really feels like a first-class Linux experience on the M100.

No, it's nice, right? Like, I didn't actually...

So I was kind of limited in what I could test.

But what I did test with 442 was some of the solver stuff, but that's really good to see.

Getting these distributions to release a generic ISO image for ARM platforms is massive.

They integrated smarter sort of graph-solving problems in algorithms earlier.

So that's great.

I did try the auto-remove after installing a whole bunch of build dependencies for ARM and ARM images.

That we then expand onto our disk and boot.

Not only is apps just generally faster.

You can get ARM laptops, you can get MacBooks, you can get water stations.

Very snappy.

Even the Pi 400 can boot iso-based. And if you have a generic ARM image like Seuss has had for a while, all these systems, as they add more support, they just work like any other standard x86 PC.

Oh, immediately.

And it's a terrific experience to be able to just put it in a thumb drive and boot an ARM box like it's a standard PC.

And you know how apt it is?

And now we're here with both Adora 42 and Ubuntu.

It's just not very structured. It's more like reading the text log, which is fine if you're a sysadmin, you're used to it. The new stuff is structured, right? It's got text layout and formatting and color highlights. So when you're removing packages, all of the packages you're removing are in red.

And they're on their own line. And it kind of works as you might expect. So I set up my test system.

And it's tabbed out so it's indented.

And I changed my user wallpaper. I tweaked some of my desktop settings. Based on the structure of the text in a way you just did not in the past version. I installed three or four flat packs and I installed three or four RPMs from the repo. And then, you know, went about using the system for a bit. And decided, let's see what sticks, what stays. Rebooted off of the ISO, went into the installer again. Sure enough,

It doesn't ask a lot of questions. Yeah, I think we did see stuff added to make it so it would stop you from doing that more often.

But even then, it didn't necessarily explain it a ton.

So that has been improved with 3.

So it remains.

It continues to stop you. I tried removing that.

It almost still in dark mode, my custom background, the icons I changed.

You can't do that.

Those were all still there.

But it was very clear about why. and big bold red letters that are like, you just tried to do something real dumb, user.

Don't do that.

Also kind of interesting, I was testing out I now have an option to add a comment when you're installing a package. And I don't know.

Maybe they'll pull it up. For an end user with isolated applications, that would truly be the experience is refresh the operating system.

You come back and all of the applications you can install with a flat pack are still there. You can do so with a comment and then later.

Maybe that's a better way to go figure out why do I have this package?

Right. So the way that it works is it, by default, Fedora installs with ButterFS.

It's not quite other declarative systems, but it's definitely a useful tool to have in your toolkit.

So with that in mind, when Anaconda detects that you have a Fedora install on ButterFS and you're going through the install process, it can offer to reinstall. And the way that it does it is it just simply erases only the sub-volumes that contain system data while retaining the sub-volumes that contain user data.

Yeah. Thank you. So that I thought was a pretty neat feature overall. I could see expanding it down the road and absolutely thumbs up on the arm support. Wes, what was your experience with Fedora 42 like? Oh, very good. Okay. Yes, yes. And, uh, you probably don't care about, but it's nice to see. I mean, I'm glad they, you know, got that, even though they're kind of phasing it out. That's great to see. Smooth, yeah. Agreed.

Yeah, I put a note saying just about a little warning that I found on the release page here. I'll read it for you because it's kind of fun.

Yeah, it seems like a good one.

Yeah, Matt Miller wrote this one. You know, it's a good one. No, it's not the Vogons, but it is ugly. We discovered a problem with the live boot media at the last minute, and since the release was already out of the airlock, we can't do much about it. It doesn't damage anything, but it is annoying. Just booting the live media adds an unexpected entry to the UEFI bootloader, even when Fedora Linux 42 is not installed to the local system.

Okay. That is a good little PSA. Fun fact.

You were.

Thank you. Now, we have a question. Neil wants you all to report in on your experience with the LX-Cute version, the Cosmic version, and the Plasma version. But specifically, probably out of all of those, we'd like people to try out the LXQ version report. And yeah, Neil?

Yeah, for sure. Because this version is special. Fedora LXQ is the first, as far as I know, again, I haven't looked super extensively, but I checked all the majors. Fedora LXQ is the first LXQ deliverable distribution, whatever, that ships LXQ with Wayland by default.

That is really neat.

And we're using the mirror mirror way compositor to do it you you know from the mirror project right so so this is a very exciting and interesting release and i would love to see people check it out try it out and give you know feedback to the mirror way project as well as you know just talk about what it how it feels and looks for them.

Yeah i'd love to people are willing out there just a little uh you know contribution to the show give it a spin and report back in send us to boost how it went. Also, I'd love personally to hear how people's experience with the Cosmic spin goes. I'd like to cast a wide net on that. So please do let us know. 1password.com slash unplugged. That's the number one, password.com and then lowercase unplugged. Now imagine your company's security a bit like the quad of a college campus.

It does seem like if you're trying to do the same thing, but you don't have the same setup.

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Microsoft, Entra, and Data for the workspace.

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Apps, and identities.

In a world where so many services and online web apps and identities are just sort of crammed down people's throat to get the job done. You need something that secures every app, every device, and every identity. Even the unmanaged ones. That's where OnePassword comes in. Check it out, support the show, see what they have to say at 1password.com slash unplugged. That's all lowercase. So you go to 1password.com slash unplugged.

Well, this week, we also saw the plucky puffin come to life. Ubuntu 2504 came shipped for us with all of the GNOME 48 stuff, like the HDR support, new well-being controls, and group notifications, including Linux kernel 614. Yeah. And Mesa 25.0.

Ooh, yeah. That's going to be, you know, all of this stuff really stacked together for both these releases. Oh, it's great for gamers. It's great for gamers. It's nice to see this stuff get in here. It's so great. And also both of them have focused on better dual boot support. There's the replace Ubuntu option and more in the OS installer. Yeah, yeah, that's neat too. So let's take a moment though and talk about the ARM64 unified ISO for this release because this is truly what's got me excited.

This is true.

Yeah yeah yeah definitely they also made a little switch it's not a big deal but the default document viewer switches from evans to papers uh which doesn't have everything but still a perfectly fine app.

Are we going to celebrate on the show? No, we're just going to get it away.

2504 is also using something new for location services. And this isn't really something you hear distributions talk a lot about, but they're now using BeaconDB to handle things like your automatic nightlight or time zone detection and weather-related features. If you enable location services, it's now using BeaconDB. Yeah, what was it before? I believe it was. Yeah, exactly. And now they switched to BeaconDB, which BeaconDB.net, a public domain wireless geolocation database.

Do we have to talk about which user? I don't know if anything's changed for the power users on the Mac platform. Not that it hasn't gone worse. I don't know that Linux has significantly involved in all those things. But for folks that do not necessarily have concrete expectations.

That is not the case with the S.G.

I'm used to this exact version of the app doing it this exact way.

I wouldn't know. It is smooth in the way that a native app is smooth. No, I know. I know. You create something that's a cross-platform. thing and I just in my brain I just associate it's going to work like electron because that's what we've had to suffer with for so long.

That's just from your jaded experience over the years Chris.

Things are getting.

Better welcome to the modern world.

I can kind of see why they like it, I know, Brent, you kicked the tires on your install with encryption and some of the disk partitioning stuff. How'd that go?

Yeah, you know me. That's a good tell for various distros and whether that goes well or not. And I have to say, I think I'm officially going to crown this the very best encryption install experience across the board.

Ah, dang. All right.

When you enable that little checkmark for encryption, you get all sorts of options. You get, of course, like Lux encryption, but ZFS, which has a little experimental tag. but it's there just like everybody else uh so zfs with and without encryption but also the new hardware backed encryption as well that uses the tpi so lots of options there and uh i'm a big fan of having many many encryption options.

I didn't actually get it i think my whole macbook's a tpm to tell you the truth, that's what it feels like I'm.

Dying for an X86 laptop again I am dying boys I think if you're willing or enjoying, have you checked the couch cushion there might be one slipped in there maybe. I'll do a little couch diving, it's great to see the ZFS options in there still maybe the one place this doesn't necessarily still fit is for folks who are busy enough with enough concerns that they need things that have those parts taken care of in a thoughtful and flexible professional way.

Oh, right, right, right.

But you're right. Outside of that, on the modern Linux desktop, we have a lot of the tools.

Maybe they're not always assembled exactly like what you need.

But the primitives are there.

Yeah.

I noticed that too on my slow connections.

Yeah, I bet you did. I agree. Yeah, I agree. Well, you know, part of that is because Fedora does a little trick where they finish some of the setup after the reboot, where you create the user account and all that kind of stuff, where Ubuntu does that up front. And so I think it creates for a longer experience. And to me, it felt like I was having to do more. But when I thought about it, it's like, well, no, I still have to do that stuff. I just do it after installation. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh yeah, you keep trying i saw you with the cottonwood, We're going back to FreeBSD.

True, yeah. Its own individual identity and website, right.

Hey, it's not technically a year.

It does make the Fedora system seem like a tighter ecosystem. I'm going to tell you something.

Not bad, not bad.

Yes, yes, I was mentioning that.

Yeah, we're going from ZFS 2 to 4 Yeah.

A new addition in AppArmor is a new profile for BubbleRap called BRAP Users Restrict, and the profile allows the creation of user namespaces and initial sandbox.

And then it switches to a stricter enforcement mode, limiting what processes can do inside that sandbox. We are not so lucky.

Not necessarily a flashy thing, but could be a nice security improvement. But like Wes said, when these things get turned up, just be aware. There's logs.

Check your logs. I did get some compiling going for ZFS already to try to help us out here.

Yeah. You bring it all together with either the latest Plasma or the latest GNOME. Of course, the other distros as well. But App 3.0, Linux 6.14, the new Mesa. and I've been seeing multiple reports of NVIDIA-Wayland combinations successfully working. Proprietary NVIDIA driver, accelerated graphics on Wayland, and it's working. I mean, can we just take a moment here? That's really good to see. I mean, I have to just circle back for a second.

Geek boosts in with 45,000 sacks.

I think since then, the biggest kind of fundamental blocker to Wayland and user adoption and things breaking during updates has been the NVIDIA driver.

And people buy these increasingly more expensive GPUs without issues for the next time you do a game.

They don't work on Linux. They're going to go somewhere where it does work, and that's Windows. And to nail this now.

To be able to start fresh.

And just install a distro with all of the modern desktop stuff in Wayland, and have it work.

There's some minor window issues in the menus.

It is turning the corner on one of the most arduous, crappy chapters in desktop Linux history. And I know it only works with certain hardware, newer hardware and all of that. But as we go forward from this point, it's only going to get better. And we'll look back. It was early 2025 when this stuff actually started shipping to end users. And we've been talking about the developments now for two years that got us here.

But we have to time ourselves on how much we use it.

Oh, I thought I had to wait till 10. Did you try it? You gave it a go. Of course. And? LS works.

Derivation dingus boosts in with 22,000 sets.

Better?

Headphone boost. Yeah. As someone who's boosted in about thoroughly enjoying highly technical content, I also have to say I enjoyed the gaming content.

I thought you'd say something.

Maybe it's the ADD.

But I personally think the wide variety is a feature.

Keeps the show feeling fresh.

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Uh, yeah, that could make an exception for you.

We got a ton of feedback on our gaming episode.

Thank you.

I got some personal feedback. We got some feedback to the show and PJ just kept bugging me to make a JV gaming den room on Matrix. And so now we have one. PJ made some additional pylons and we made that happen. Thank you very much. And also, uh, get over there.

If you want to organize maybe some community gaming nights.

That's up to you guys. We're not involved. If you want to get in there, we have a link in the show notes. The JB Gaming Den.

Yep, check it out on our self-hosted Matrix. And our baller booster comes from the handsome, the delightful, the wonderful Adversary 17 with 84,768 sats.

Yeah, we had to remind you to, you know, sign off to do the show.

Atversaries writes, I really liked the gaming episode. It was fun to hear y'all just kind of hanging out. And here's some sats for a headset boost. And he says, and I appreciate this. We play this in the member stream. The headset sample sounds good to my ears. and for what it's worth, I'm kind of picky about audio, having been an audio technician for years. How do we not know that?

Yeah, I did sense it.

Yeah, thank you adversaries, I try to change it up.

So what, full disclosure, Gene Bean was helping me.

And that was even with a bit of a head cold.

It turned out that if you sent my node We'll be trying them out for Linux West and Northwest.

Well, not trying them out.

We're going all in. We'll look cool. Between 600 and 1,000 bytes or characters. I forget the specific. But basically, under that, fine. above that fine but in this right range there's a bug in the key send plugin that meant that the stats would not make it to me so to recreate that i just kept copying gene's message so that's really gene's message that i sent like 11 times oh boy.

You know that was just open source recently i think if i got that right so i think we should jump jump jump into that yeah.

All right all right i'm down i'm down.

Well the tebby dog also said gene also so we'll have that later.

On yeah i just sent so many that.

I've been learning and configuring a new proposal software at work when i hit a snag during setup i wished for easier access to expert support as waiting for availability didn't always fit my timeline to solve this i set up an open web ui knowledge base with all the available documentation from the developers and now i can just ask an lm questions and it provides answers with citations from that documentation it's been working great.

I mean, that is a great solution. I am kind of chuckling, though, that you had time to set up an LLM and open web UI and then somehow get at the documentation, which I don't even know how you do that. But you didn't have time to sit on support, which sounds like something I would do.

I was taking public transit last week, and folks across from me on the train were talking about just, I don't know if it was exactly the R36, but they were legit talking about little handhold emulator devices because they wanted to get one.

How did you feed it and train it on the docks? How are you doing that?

How do we get access? too.

Right. I want that. I'd love to be able to feed all our show notes. That would be so cool.

Well, with Starcher F64, probably.

Brons and Wings here with a row of ducks. Headphones and gaming.

DD Spec comes in with 3,000.

Cents. How about a row of ducks for that, I say. That's much appreciated.

Thank you, Brons. Also, would love if you could get Mr. Dominic on a Jupyter pod, or Chris or Wes could go on New Coder. I love the small business owner's perspective on that.

Alright, it's gonna happen. yeah, especially these days.

I don't know so okay i noticed that acoustica boosted from the all shows which is cool via phone i think i maybe not do chapters not show up there because the show should have chapters would help in this particular case my kids maybe there's a technical reason they.

Naturally just started using discover and um software depending on one of them's on plasm one of them's on you know, and they just install things via flat pack. I sat down with them. Like you had all these things. Oh yeah. Well, I wanted a new Minecraft and launcher. So I just searched.

About t-mux uh i specifically remember when i forced myself to learn this and chris it's your fault a couple years ago you did a refresh of a system over ssh yeah well and uh your your main moral of the story was more gaming content he said the word also like odyssey i've.

Lost i don't know 70-plus hours?

Well, our dear Odyssey Wester came in with 10,000.

Due to what seems like a sync bug between two PCs. Oh, my.

While I love to hear more gaming stuff in general, I think just discussing your experience instead of listening to clips would be the best way to go forward for me. Just hearing you guys playing and not having visual context was the confusing part. Otherwise, you're better off just creating a gaming video instead as extra content for those curious. Either way, I will see you at LinuxFest Northwest.

It's a tricky thing, right? That's why one of the reasons we went with StarDrop.

Wonderful to hear from you.

It's such a well-known. But, you know, then it was also suggested that maybe future gaming stuff we do in the launch or something, which we could totally do. So keep tuning in. You never know where we're going to go next. Rotted Mood comes in with 10,000 sets. No message, just the value. Thank you, Mood. Nice to hear from you.

Yeah well every show can't be like that because if we do it again we're gonna lose to brent, uh-huh outdoor geek boosts in five thousand cents, oh but actually i think in this case brent should be boosting them because uh outdoor geek writes hey brent on my nyx os laptop the kde indexer would sometimes wake the laptop from sleep about a minute after the laptop was seeming to go to sleep this config turns off the indexer and then there's a link to a nyx config for you.

Okay, you got to tell us more about that, Tomato. Please boost back and tell us more about that. So we'll give you all a heads up. I think we're also looking for tool suggestions. We're still kind of in the discovery phase, and then we'll lock in and give you a date so you can do it along with us. This is one of my favorite boosts of the week. This is a very well thought out boost.

That sounds slick.

And there are ways to solve this today. There are technologies that could solve it. But I agree with you, it's going to take some kind of meltdown to create a mass exodus. i maintain that post microsoft exodus acquisition there we go they've they've rebuilt stronger and better and there's just no unseating that i think maybe for the next couple of decades, Fuzzy Mistborn moves in with 2,500 sats. And you know, they haven't really burned anybody in a really bad way since the acquisition.

You must construct additional bylons. Love the episode, makes me want to go and start StarCraft. And you know, StarCraft 2, that was an excellent trilogy as well. I think that bit's for Brent.

19,111 sats saying, here's a little support for LinuxFest Northwest cost. Hope you guys have a great time.

Thank you. Thank you for the boost, turd. Sam H is here with 9001 sats. He says, I enjoyed the gaming content. A few things I would like to know about retro handheld game systems, like the one you mentioned. At least they're based on Linux from what I have read. The cheaper ones, though, sometimes run a more lockdown version of Linux.

Coming up that's.

That's the real that's the real day i think i'm gonna don't tell my dad but i think i'm gonna get him caffeinated linux moves in with so cool right and he's got he's still got his old no way black screen.

Long time listener.

But it's funny how small the screen is. And the other thing that struck me, because I was over at his place this weekend and I was, you know, playing Tetris. One cartridge at a time.

Oh yeah, right.

And I've got one that's thinner with a bigger screen that has 18,000 ROMs on it.

And like one cartridge at a time. Because that was about roughly when I first got started with a bunch of things. 610 works though.

I didn't know, I didn't get to play it. I was so sad on Tetris.

I got my USB Wi-Fi adapter is finally working. Yeah. So here's two thousand and six bits in honor of two great releases from 2006. Also love hearing the deep dive and gaming episodes and would love to hear.

Hey, thank you for the review report.

Well, GC boosted in 7,777 sats. Best show ever. Been binge listening on old episodes and you know, it's too much when that Bang Bus song is stuck in your head.

Oh no, not the Bang Bus one.

When wes gets technical it's a thing of beauty.

Yeah we do love it we do love it.

I will be in your neck of the woods in a few weeks presenting at a grafana con with my nixos laptop oh.

Okay grafana con wes.

And also this happens to be a zip code boost if you take the boost and you go times 12 and plus 118, you get that old zip code.

Oh, good, because we were just saying before the show, like, we haven't had a zip code boost in a long time and we miss it, and Wes has been bringing the map every week. Whoa. Whoa. Got a little dusty. Alright. Yeah, now slide that over. Slide that one over. Mm-hmm. Right. Okay. Paper map, of course. Yeah, plug it into your paper map, Wes. Damn theater of the mind, Wes.

I like the LEDs you added for where the zip codes come from.

Yeah, well, you know, it was hard to read in the dark. I feel like... People do not appreciate that. People do not appreciate that. What do we got? What do we got? What do we got? It says green. Oh! Hello, California. Thank you for boosting in. And GC, thank you for being a zip code boost. We love those. You know, it's fun to make Wes search the map during the show. Both Brent and I just like to sit back and watch.

It's folding it back up that I appreciate the most, actually.

Yeah nobody doesn't like us nobody doesn't like you yes let us know how it goes and thank you everybody who stream sats as you listened as well we had 31 of you stream sats and you did a pretty good lift i have to say thank you very much 79,430 sats were streamed as you listen to the show that's pretty rad and then when you combine that with our boosters episode 611 are before linux fest Northwest episode, stack 294,854 sets.

That sounds right.

And Fountain makes it the easiest, but there are lots of options. Thank you, everybody who supports the show, our members, our boosters. It means a heck of a lot to us.

Self-hostable, GPL-ed Zelda. Wow.

Now let's talk about Ignition. Well, that's what they called it. I guess it's kind of a cute name, you know, starting your system up. Ignition is a minimal app for editing the auto-start entries on a free desktop-compliant Linux distribution. Read your distribution of choice. Now, most desktop environments, well, actually, that's not true. Some desktop environments have tools built in to manage your quote-unquote startup items. But not everyone does, and not all of them catch everything.

And you can take things out of your startup. You know, at first it just seemed like, okay, kind of a handy way to, maybe you were going to go ask Gyppity something or Cloud or whatever else or your local Ollama or OpenWeb UI.

It's GPL3.

Oftentimes, that's just kind of a lot of context switching from the terminal, right? Like, you know, okay, copy and paste bits of the file I'm working with.

Love this.

It's called Record Fs. As often happens, like, oh, I want an FFM pick in the end. And it's just a very simple, well, in design, a desktop application that allows you to record audio from a specific application. The height wasn't divisible by two.

And that makes it just before unhappy. I could go top.

Pop to another tab and ask something there. Or I could just sort of echo my prompt into this tool and have it spit me out the command.

And then you can save the recording.

So I just kind of started that way.

By default to your music directory. So you could capture a live stream like ours, a YouTube video you're watching, anything.

Absolutely. Or capture a blog file.

This always happens to me when I'm capturing audio. If you have an app that gives you something.

You won't capture.

Because it's only using the audio from that one application.

So then I can just set up a little loop where I echo what I want the script to do. And then I use T to record the results. So I would have it continue the pipe, but also write to a file so I could actually see what was generated because in a test system, I decided I would just start piping these directly to Bash or Python. So I would say like, write me a Bash script to do X and just pipe it to Bash.

I'll have links to their GitHub repos and their Flatpak pages. No, I did not.

I was trying this in a semi-safe situation.

I'm always grabbing little audio bits and stuff like that. So I'm always looking for applications that can record desktop application.

And that was kind of fun too because it felt like do experiment in like what kind of scripts or even applications, especially ones I started, you know i was doing python and i would set up there's a lot more virtual environment i'd give it sort of a standard set of libraries you know okay you can make it okay you've got a thing to like but i think west is right is pipewire brings us to the whole and so it became a really easy way to experiment with just how

Which is going to be our big one live from LinuxFest Northwest. It's coming. It's coming very soon. So make it a Linux weekend. Join us on Saturday for the Linux Fest Northwest live stream and then Sunday for our live episode from Linux Fest Northwest, both at jblive.tv or direct audio at jblive.fm. And we're going to also try to have it up on our YouTube pages and whatnot.

Okay, at first it was cool just to see what kind of range it up with.

Links to what we talked about in this episode. We're all trying these AIs. Like, oh, you can make it safe on your stuff.

And look, it made some code that mostly works.

You also find links for our Mumble Room, our Matrix Chat, where you can become a member and support us directly.

Limits of what it can quickly make a program are are the limits thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of your unplugged program generate a c program see you right back here next tuesday only the standard as in sunday linux c gcc plus ffmpeg and make a procedurally generated landscape fly over into an mp4 i don't know how to do that offhand uh but i know how ffmpeg works enough to know that the c can just sort of spit bitmaps out and ffmpeg can turn it into an mp4 and